Saturday, May 19, 2012

Thor of Asgard

Mighty Mighty

A new Marvel design coming down the pipeline as a shirt. Developments and release dates to follow!
[EDIT: The official shirt released today: Find it here at WeLoveFine.com]
[EDIT II: The Loki counterpart to this design process post and shirt released here!]

Thor Norse design

Thor-ough Research
This one went through a research phase before starting. I knew I wanted to work in traditional Norse and Scandinavian art styles so I took a trip to the library. The Cerritos Library had a reference section with some really amazing books on Vikings and the Poetic Edda, an old Norse mythological poem.
I used this nifty site that can turn letters into runes, so the text incorporated into the linework is phonetically translatable to the alphabet.
The left side recounts the tale of the Midgard Snake, Jormungandr and the right side concerns the formation of the World Tree Yggradsil and the connection of the Nine Realms. Hence there are purposely 9 main spheres in the design.

Nested icons within the Serpent include (clockwise from the head) the Bifrost/Rainbow Bridge, Hiemdall, Odin, one of his Ravens, a Viking ship, the Destroyer armor, Loki, and Odin's horse Slepnir.
Around the hammer Mjolnir are the famous words in runes:

"Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, 
shall possess the power of Thor."

Here are some process pictures of a very limited edition screenprint I made for Long Beach Comic Expo last weekend. It was the fast one-day show but a great turnout. Great to meet a whole bunch of people as well see some familiar faces around this convention season. Much like the Realms, I only made 9 of these to release into the world. Fly my pretties~
Drying time
[Read More] for process pics :

Test copies
Two color passes
Transparency alignment

Photo emulsion

Washing out unexposed parts
Emulsion cleaned screen
The printing inks 

First color application
Flooding the screen

The first color pass
Drying the first color set 
One down...

The final set

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